I just dont get though that learning abcs is basically square one. if they cant learn that, that is your problem as a teacher. you cant exactly blame it on previous habits or poor teaching. youre literally basically the beginning of formal schooling.
In my opinion, this might be why some kids start out behind.
My kids definitely knew their letters and alphabet well before starting school. I think a lot of kids do.
I'm not saying parents should sit down little kids and teach them letters in a formal way. Instead, if you're always reading things to your kid (books, yes, but not just books!), they'll start pointing at words and signs and asking what it says.
Let's say a kid is pointing to a breakfast sign on the street. You can point out the letter B on it. "See that letter? It's a B. Buh, buh, buh..." and then you can move your finger along the whole word as you say, "Bacon. Oh, they must sell bacon inside."
Kids learn that the letters make sounds, and the writing represents words, and those words give us information.
Not all of that can be taught in school. Teachers can teach letters and sound, but understanding the importance of it comes from interacting with the real world. I think if parents took those pre-literacy steps with their kids, it would help them out a lot.
How do you sing the NATO phonetics? I need to do this because Alpha - Hotel is fine, but i can’t think of I off the top of my head but know Juliett and Kilo….
Then why kids 10 years ago could learn the alphabet just fine and now so many struggle ? There are some kids who can no longer sit on a bench without falling every second, for some reason there are now quite a few that can't stay still, they have to be doing things at all times. That has nothing to do with teachers, parents have a role to play too.
Mind you, it's not the kids claiming it's too difficult at that age. It's the parents.
I'm a teacher. I've taught as young as 3 (and as old as 75) and my students could learn the song in about a month or two of classes. Some kids came to class knowing it because the parents taught them. And then you spend the next few months doing about 2-4 letters per week to build phonics, recognition, CVC words, and learning the individual letters that have exceptions (long vs short vowels, soft vs hard Cs&Gs, silent vowels, etc.) so that the run is just fun.
4 months. Half a school year for basically babies and they can have the alphabet mastered and be reading but the parents (and teachers) have to put in the work.
I mean this isn't really the counter example you think it is. The claim isn't that it is too hard to learn. We all learned it that way obviously it is possible. The claim is that the "new" way is easier to learn. And all the data supports that claim. As a people we really don't like changing from something that worked for us but "good enough" should never be the end point of education.
Basically your kids could be learn the old song in an average of a month and a half but the new one in an average of a month and a quarter why are you insisting on using the old song? The only answers are either selfish (I do it my way/don't want to learn a new way) and/or arrogant (that you know better from your experience despite not actually examining the research, just going off your gut). Or possibly anti-intellectual but that shouldn't have any place in education so shouldn't have to consider it.
The most popular study on the new alphabet was looking at kids with learning disabilities & differences and they found it helped those kids, not that it was better (and let's be clear better not faster) but that it was a new tool to help kids who weren't getting it. It then gets picked up by some others to try out in the general population education and there were some qualitative evidence saying kids were pronouncing the letters more clearly as they say the alphabet, others tracked the average learn time to be faster but admitted there are other factors involved so it must be better, yadda, yadda. These studies weren't particularly reliable, mind you, because other teachers found the old way worked just as well and just as fast.
All of this is around 10 years ago, so at the time, we only saw short-term studies about it and it wasn't widely adopted. So someone came in and said, we're in a literacy crisis. What are some factors contributing to this? Let's look at these 5th grade classes (<100 kids) in a school that has adopted the new alphabet song, and wouldn't you fucking know? There were fewer kids who could do the alphabet in order. There are shortcomings to this research. It's something that we need to recreate, but the longitudinal study of the new song is that people don't remember the new song and just as everyone in this thread is saying, "I still sing that song when I forget!" the new kids can't say that because it's not catchy. And even if they learned it faster (which arguable), fast learning is fast forgetting. You want kids to learn things long term. That is what teachers refer to as better, because I don't give 2 shits about kindergartners learning something a week faster. I care if they can remember those things in a year.
So, did you read any of these studies for your master's degree? Did you just hear someone comment about it once and you're referring to results you think it has based on your gut?
Intellectualism is not abandoning things that worked (lmnop, teaching grammar, teaching spelling, etc.) in favor of new trendy education. We've tried teaching just sight words based on faulty research and it again was a bad idea. We tried going off Chomsky's universal grammar that kids will naturally pick up grammar and vocab and spelling and the results say it was a bad idea. This new alphabet song seems to be
Not much faster
Worse in the long term learning
specific useful as a back up
Also, no researcher is ever going to say "This is better!" They say, "Here are my results. Please challenge them," and now that we are, they're pretty easily challenged.
I wish everyone would read this comment start to finish. but the people claiming it is good after "reading the research" are the same people who won't be able to sit through reading 3 paragraphs. either way thank you
It's not like they've changed the alphabet, it just stops kids getting stuck at that weird elemenopee run in the middle and helps them differentiate between the letters at an earlier age.
though if the hard part is lmnop, why replace it with wxyz, which is arguably harder. it even has more syllables. and make the entire song not rhyme anymore on top of that
I think it's because the hard sounds of W X Y Z gives a clearer vocal seperation. Few children are sounding out a single letter called doubleyouexx or whyzee but ellem or ennoo blend together easier.
I'm a middle-aged father of two and I still have to sing the song sometimes, I'm not gonna shame anyone for what they call it...as long as they know the actual letters.
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u/mb99 Sep 02 '26
If learning ABCs are too difficult we really are cooked as a species